Excerpt from essay, Planet Earth and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker:

Dr. Underhill said, if we would destroy insects, we must preserve birds. Birds which run up the trunks of trees, like the Woodpeckers, are of especial benefit. They dig out the larvae of insects from the bark and devour it. A Cat-bird would destroy a hundred caterpillars in a day. Where birds, even Crows, are destroyed, it is through lack of knowledge of their usefulness.

Account of a Farmer’s Club meeting, “City Items”, NY Tribune, 1846.

His ardent desire was to kill an Ivory-billed woodpecker. “I have never seen but one,” he said, “and that was in the Smithsonian Institute.”